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Nurture kinship
Nurture kinship is a concept in the anthropological study of human social relationships (kinship) that highlights the extent to which such relationships are brought into being through the performance of various acts of nurture between individuals. The concept stands in contrast to the earlier anthropological concepts of human kinship relations being fundamentally based on 'blood ties', some other form of shared substance, or a proxy for these, as in fictive kinship. This conception of the ontology of social ties has become stronger in the wake of David M. Schneider's influential Critique of the Study of Kinship''Schneider, D. (1984) ''A critique of the study of kinship. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.. Intellectual Background Reports of kinship ties being based of various forms of shared nurture date back at least to Robertson Smith’s (1889) compiled Lectures on 'The Religion of the Semites': At this stage, Robertson Smith interpreted the kinship ties emerging from the sharing of food as constituting an alternative form of the sharing of substance, and contrasted it with the sharing of blood or genetic substance. Later observations however focused on the nurturing qualities of food sharing, allowing a potential distinction between the performance / shared-substance conceptualizations. Sometimes the line between substance and nurture is blurred through conceptualizing e.g. the food / milk given as the medium through which nurture is performed (e.g. Strathern 1973). The notion that it is the nurturing acts themselves that create the ties between people has developed most noticeably since the 1970s: The term 'nurture kinship' may have been first used in the present context by Watson (1983)Watson, J. (1983) Tairora culture: Contingency and pragmatism.Seattle: University of Washington Press. who contrasted it with 'nature kinship' (kinship concepts built upon shared substance of some kind). Since the 1970s an increasing number of ethnographies have documented the extent to which social ties in various cultures can be understood to be built upon nurturant acts[http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1791365 Holland, Maximilian. (2004) Social Bonding and Nurture Kinship: Compatibility between Cultural and Biological Approaches. London School of Economics, PhD Thesis]. Ethnographic Examples Marshall on the Truk (now known as the Chuuk) of micronesia: Gow on the Piro of Amazonia: Thomas on the Temanambondro of Madagascar: Storrie on the Hoti of Venezuelan Guiana: Viegas on a Bahian Amerinidian Community in Brazil: Link with Attachment Theory See also: attachment theory It can be seen from the ethnographies that several anthropologists have found that describing social ties in terms of emotional attachments is appropriate. This has prompted some to suggest that a inter-disciplinary collaboration might be useful: Within the discipline of psychology, the formation of social and emotional ties are treated by attachment theory. Drawing on animal studies from the 1950s onwards, John BowlbyBowlby, J. (1982) Attachment, 2nd edition. Vol. 1. London: Hogarth. and colleagues described how, for all primates (including humans) the reliable provision of nurture and care leads to strong bonds of attachment between the carer and cared-for. Following the nurture kinship approach thus allows a synthesis between the extensive cross-cultural data of ethnographers and the long-standing findings of psychology on the nature of human bonding and emotional ties. Parallels with developments in evolutionary biology See also: Darwinian anthropology In evolutionary biology the theory treating the evolution of social cooperation emerged in a formal version in the 1960s and 1970s in the form of inclusive fitness theory, and a related theory, kin selection. The theory specifies that one criterion for the evolution of certain kinds of social traits is a statistical association of identical genes, as would exist when close genetic relatives associate with one-another. Common extensions of the theory applied to humans took as their starting position the former anthropological perspective that human kinship is fundamentally 'based on' blood-ties. However, these extensions emerged at precisely the time that anthropology was reflexively critiquing this 'blood-ties' assumption behind traditional kinship theorizing. This led some anthropologists to strongly attack the emerging biological perspectives as suffering the same ethnocentric assumptions (e.g. 'blood is thicker than water') that the anthropologists themselves had been working to overcome. This lack of agreement led to something of a stand-off and lack of communication between the disciplines, resulting in little cooperation and progress for almost three decades. The stand-off was resolved in 2004 by the publication of a synthesis which re-visited inclusive fitness theory to draw a distinction between the evolutionary mechanisms for the emergence of social traits and the proximate mechanisms through which they are expressed. In a strict interpretation of the theory, a statistical association of related genes (as would be present in the interactions of close genetic relatives) is understood as a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for the evolutionary emergence of certain traits relating to social cooperation (see kin selection). However, this does not entail that the proximate mechanisms governing the expression of such social traits in primates and humans necessarily depends on conditions of genetic relatedness per se. For the vast majority of social mammals, including primates and humans, the formation of social bonds (and the resulting social cooperation) are based on familiarity from an early developmental stage, and the same kinds of mechanisms that attachment theorist (see above) have outlined. In short, in humans and in other primates, genetic relatedness is not necessary for the attachment bonds to develop, and it is the performance of nurture that underlies those bonds and the enduring social cooperation that typically accompanies them (see Holland (2004) for a review). Therefore the nurture kinship perspective leads to the synthesis of evolutionary biology, psychology and socio-cultural anthropology on the topic of social bonding and cooperation. See also * Kinship * Darwinian anthropology * Attachment theory * Inclusive fitness * Kin selection Notes Category:Kinship Category:Nurturance